Today, the danger of early hearing loss is found in one out of four teenagers which is the result of long listening music on their MP3 players and iPods. These devices are a fundamental improvement of the walkman, which provide the users with crystal clear sound at a high volume.
Professor Chava Muchnik of audiology at Tel Aviv University (TAU) faculty of Medicine and of the Sheba Medical Centre, the journal for Audiology report said that teens are in danger of early loss of hearing as a result of direct listening habits. The researchers of TAU marked these personal listening devices (PLDs) as causing serious health problems, especially for the teenagers. Professor Muchnik studied with his colleagues on teenagers ‘habits of music listening, taking acoustic measures of preferred levels of listening, as stated by TAU. The result clearly demonstrate that teens have harmful habits of music listening on iPods and MP3 devices. In the coming 10-20 years, teens will be suffering much early from loss of hearing, than the expected natural age.
Pupils who are misusing the PLDs will definitely understand their faults when their hearing ability will start detoriating while they reach their 30s and 40s. Muchnik took 289 teens of 13 to 17 years of age for his first stage of study. For his second stage, 74 teens took their participation for the measurement of the listening levels in an environment that was both noisy and quiet. The result made Muchnik worrisome.
It depicted that PLDs were regularly used by eighty percent of teens; about 21 percent use these for one to four hours and some about eight percent listen music for more than four hours. The data along with the result of acoustic measurement indicate that almost a quarter of the participants are at the risk for hearing loss.
